Read Two Little Savages; Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned by Ernest Thompson Seton Free Online

Book Title: Two Little Savages; Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They LearnedThe author of the book:Ernest Thompson SetonEdition: Carpenter PressDate of issue: August 26th 2008ISBN: 1443720178ISBN 13: 9781443720175Language: EnglishFormat files: PDFThe size of the: 8.71 MBCity - Country: No dataLoaded: 2889 timesReader ratings: 3.5

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Subtitle: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned.

Let's go straight to the Savages in the title. Seton wrote this in 1903. You would expect '...and he reflects the values of his time,' — but that's just not accurate, except for the word savage. I can't recall one instance of it in the text. In this book Indian methods are always the preferred pattern, the esteemed goal, the measure of authenticity.

Yan grew up in a whacked-out Scots Presbyterian home, very similar to John Muir's. No love, no affection, but a Bible-quoting, authoritarian father. His home training was all of the crushing kind.

This sounds autobiographical. Wikipedia reports: "On his twenty-first birthday, Seton's father presented him with a bill for all the expenses connected with his childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor who delivered him. He paid the bill, but never spoke to his father again."

Recovering from a long illness, 14-year old Yan is sent to live and do chores on the Raften farm. Sam Raften, Yan's age, joins in Yan's absorbing interest in imitating an Indian lifestyle. Sam's dad values their endeavors and challenges them to live for a month in a teepee they construct, on food they forage. They make a teepee, a drum, bow and arrows; dig a fresh-water well; learn tanning, tracking and taxidermy.

There are dangers, some life-threatening. It wouldn't be a boys' story without them.

The illustrations, sprinkled on the edges of most pages, are delightful. Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13499/...

Favorite quotes:When a father was setting his son up in life he gave him simply a good axe. The axe was the grand essential of life and work...

I delight in be-prefix words. The parade of them at the end of this sentence sent my fingers fluttering! It was two hours toil for the mother to turn the four brown-limbed, nearly naked, dirty, happy, towsle-tops into four little martyrs, befrocked, beribboned, becombed and bebooted.

Discovering that touching the inside of the teepee during a rainstorm causes it to leak is more easily remembered than explained.

Oh, the magic of the campfire! No unkind feeling long withstands its glow. For men to meet at the same campfire is to come closer, to have better understanding of each other, and to lay the foundations of lasting friendship.

Read information about the author

Ernest Thompson Seton was a Scots-Canadian (and naturalized U.S. citizen) who became a noted author, wildlife artist, founder of the Woodcraft Indians, and one of the founding pioneers of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Seton also heavily influenced Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting. His notable books related to Scouting include The Birch Bark Roll and The Boy Scout Handbook. He is responsible for the strong influence of American Indian culture in the BSA.

He was born Ernest Evan Thompson in South Shields, County Durham (now part of South Tyneside, Tyne and Wear), England of Scottish parents and his family emigrated to Canada in 1866. As a youth, he retreated to the woods to draw and study animals as a way of avoiding his abusive father. He won a scholarship in art to the Royal Academy in London, England.

He later rejected his father and changed his name to Ernest Thompson Seton. He believed that Seton had been an important name in his paternal line. He developed a fascination with wolves while working as a naturalist for Manitoba. He became successful as a writer, artist and naturalist, and moved to New York City to further his career. Seton later lived at Wyndygoul, an estate that he built in Cos Cob, a section of Greenwich, Connecticut. After experiencing vandalism by the local youth, Seton invited them to his estate for a weekend where he told stories of the American Indians and of nature.

He formed the Woodcraft Indians in 1902 and invited the local youth to join. The stories became a series of articles written for the Ladies Home Journal and were eventually collected in the The Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians in 1906.

He was married twice. The first marriage was to Grace Gallatin in 1896. Their only daughter, Ann, was born in 1904 and died in 1990. Ann, who later changed her first name, became a best-selling author of historical and biographical novels as Anya Seton. According to her introduction to the novel Green Darkness, both of her parents were practicing Theosophists. Ernest and Grace divorced in 1935, and Ernest soon married Julia M. Buttree. Julia would write works by herself and with Ernest. They did not have any children, but did adopt an infant daughter, Beulah (Dee) Seton (later Dee Seton Barber), in 1938. Dee Seton Barber died in 2006.

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